Mail.ru Group and Yandex, Russia’s largest Internet companies, as well as Sberbank, the state-owned financial institution turning into a tech giant, made the headlines in 2019. Meanwhile, a few Russian and Ukrainian companies from the e-commerce and online gaming sectors began asserting themselves internationally.

Sberbank is no longer just the good old savings bank that survived all Russian revolutions since the middle of the nineteenth century. It has become a tentacular tech group well beyond financial services.

Last year saw this empire expand continuously. Sberbank’s most notable moves included:

In February, Sberbank went as far as to launch a neuroscience and human behavior laboratory. This lab will aim to make the results of its research available to Sberbank affiliates “in their everyday practice,” making their products “completely relevant” to people’s needs.

The past year was not entirely rosy for Yandex, however. Its alliance with Sberbank was obviously weakened after Yandex co-founder and main shareholder Arkady Volozh declined, in late 2018, the bank’s pressing offer to buy a major stake in the company. Sberbank’s friendly moves towards Mail.ru Group, Yandex’s archrival, all along 2019, were perceived as a potential alliance U-turn that could deprive Yandex from significant resources.

In late 2019, facing a long-standing government pressure, Yandex went through a major overhaul of its governance structure. A new “Public Interest Foundation” will be given veto power over significant ownership transactions. Through this and other provisions, the new ownership structure seeks to address the Russian government’s concerns that the NASDAQ-listed company — seen as a critical piece of Russia’s national online infrastructure — could be controlled one day by foreign shareholders.

Playrix – a company founded in Vologda, Russia, in 2004 – made the news several times in the course of the year, asserting itself as a global leader in free-to-play mobile games. In April 2019, its founders Igor and Dmitry Bukhman appeared in Bloomberg’s list of US dollar billionaires. In August, Playrix made an investment in Vizor, a major Belarusian publisher of multiplayer games for browser, social networks and mobile platforms. In November, the company announced the acquisition of Ukrainian game studio Zagrava Games.

In April 2019, this Ukrainian-owned classifieds platform became an African e-commerce leader by acquiring from Naspers the activities of OLX, its main competitor, on the continent. In December, this “combination of eBay and Craigslist” announced the completion of a $21 million round led by Abu Dhabi-based Knuru Capital. Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, Jiji is backed by Genesis, a Kyiv-based company which is behind a variety of Internet and mobile projects.

Deals of the year

Venture deals

In Russia, where venture activity hardly reaches $1 billion per year (less than 0.5% of the global VC market), few venture deals reached or exceeded the $10 million mark.

The largest investment went to e-commerce major Ozon, which is engaged in a race for market leadership. In May 2019, a $150 million convertible loan was provided by two of its existing shareholders, private equity firm Baring Vostok and LSE-listed conglomerate Sistema, to help the company maintain its current growth rate (nearly 75% a year) and develop its logistic and IT infrastructure.

Brilliant Ukrainian entrepreneurs also made their way in the US. In May 2019, for example, CRM software startup People.ai secured $60 million round of funding from prestigious Silicon Valley investors. In October, Grammarly, a San Francisco-based startup born in Ukraine, was valued at more than $1 billion as it secured $90 million in a round led by General Catalyst. Grammarly thus became the first-ever unicorn from Ukraine.

In Belarus, few deals attained significant amounts. In August a local fund, Zubr Capital, announced an investment of several millions of US dollars (from $3.5 million to $10 million, according to the local media) in MediaCube, a provider of IT tools for video and music creators.

International acquisitions

Illustrating the talent of tech founders and teams from Eastern Europe, 2019 was marked by impressive exits with international implications:

In another major transaction, in early 2019, Naspers took full control of Avito, Russia’s leading classifieds site, at a $3.85 billion valuation. The company was founded in the late 2000s by Swedish entrepreneurs and backed repeatedly by Swedish fund VNV.

A rare case of a Russian acquisition in the US also took place. In August, Abbyy bought TimelinePI, a process intelligence solution provider, for an undisclosed amount (estimated at $20 million). Abbyy is a renowned, Moscow-based software company working on document recognition and language processing.

A few modest IPOs took place in the Russian tech sector. Thus, in May 2019, HeadHunter Group, a leading online job recruitment platform in Russia, raised $220 million on the NASDAQ and saw its market capitalization grow to $787.5 million at the close of the first day.

In October Tinkoff, an innovation-friendly online bank, began trading on the Moscow stock exchange. This secondary listing was designed to help Tinkoff, which has its primary listing in London and is domiciled in Cyprus, secure an estimated $200 million inflow from Russia-focused investment funds.

Fund creations

Several large investment funds involving state-backed organizations were launched or announced in Russia, including these ones:

RDIF, the Russian sovereign fund, agreed high-tech investment partnerships amounting to up to $3 billion with Middle East and Chinese players. These partnerships included a $2 billion plan to support Russian startups developing AI projects as well as a joint Russo-Chinese R&D fund project involving the China Investment Corporation (CIC);